"Well, I think he is dead now, after that stroke. I almost severed his head."

"I doubt if he is," she said. "It's my belief he is our most powerful enemy and we shall not have to deal with him in any serious way until we near the Fortress of the Pearl itself."

"He protects the Fortress?"

"Many do." She embraced him again, swiftly, then sank to one knee to inspect the dead Count of Magnes Doar. In death he more resembled a man, for already the hair on his face and hands was fading to grey and even his flesh seemed on the point of disappearance. The brass helm, too, had turned an ugly shade of silver. Elric was reminded of Alnac's dying. He averted his eyes.

Oone, too, stood up quickly and there were tears in her eyes. The tears were not for the Count of Magnes Doar. Elric took her in his arms. He was suddenly full of longing for someone he barely remembered from old dreams, the dreams of his youth, someone who, perhaps, had never existed.

He thought he felt a slight shudder run through Oone as he embraced her. He reached out for a memory of a little boat, of a fair-haired girl sleeping at the bottom of the vessel as it drifted out to open sea, of himself sailing a skiff towards her, full of pride that he might be her rescuer. Yet he had never known such a girl, he was sure, though Oone reminded him of that girl grown up.

With a gasp Oone moved away from him. "I thought you were ... It's as if I'd always known you..." She put her hands to her face. "Oh, this damned land is well-called, Elric!"

"Yet what danger is there to us?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Who knows? Much or little. None? The dreamthieves say that it is in the Land of Forgotten Love that the most important decisions are made. Decisions which can have the most monumental consequences."

"So one should do nothing here? Make no decisions?"

She passed her fingers through her hair. "At least we should be aware that the consequences might not manifest themselves for a long while yet."

Together they left the dead rabbit-warrior behind them and continued down the tunnel of trees. Now from time to time Elric thought he saw faces peering at him from the green shadows. Once he was sure he saw the figure of his dead father, Sadric, mourning for Elric's mother, the only creature he had ever truly loved. So strong was the image that Elric called out.

"Sadric! Father! Is this your Limbo?"

At this Oone cried urgently. "No! Do not address him. Do not bring him to you. Do not make him real! It is a trap, Elric. Another trap."

"My father?"

"Did you love him?"

"Aye. Though it was an unhappy kind of love."

"Remember that. Do not bring him here. It would be obscene to recall him to this gallery of illusion."

Elric understood her and used all his habits of self-discipline to rid himself of his father's shade. "I tried to tell him, Oone, how much I grieved for him in his loss and his sorrow." He was weeping. His body was shaking with an emotion from which he believed he had long since freed himself. "Ah, Oone. I would have died myself to let him have his wife returned to him. Is there no way...?"

"Such sacrifices are meaningless," she said, gripping him in both her hands and holding him to her. "Especially here. Remember your quest. We have already crossed three of the seven lands which will bring us to the Fortress of the Pearl. We have crossed half this. That means we have already accomplished more than most. Hold on to yourself, Prince of Melnibone. Remember who and what depends upon your success!"

"But if I have the opportunity to make something right that was so wrong ...?"

"That is to do with your own feelings, not what is and what can be. Would you invent shadows and make them play out your dreams? Would that bring happiness to your tragic mother and father?"

Elric looked over her shoulder into the forest. There was no sign of his father now. "He seemed so real. Of such solid flesh!"

"You must believe that you and I are the only solid flesh in this entire land. And even we are-" She stopped herself. She reached up to his face and kissed it. "We will rest for a little, if only to restore our psychic strength."

And Oone drew Elric down into the soft leaves at the side of the path. And she kissed him and she moved her lovely hands over his body and slowly she became all that he had lost in his love of women and he knew that he, in turn, became everything she had ever refused to allow herself to desire in a man. And he knew, without guilt or regret, that their love-making had no past and that its only future lay somewhere beyond their own lives, beyond any realm they would ever visit, and that neither would ever witness the consequences.

And in spite of this knowledge they were careless and they were happy and they gave each other the strength they would need if they ever hoped to fulfill their quest and reach the Fortress of the Pearl.

CHAPTER FOUR.

The Intervention of a Navigator Surprised by his own lack of confusion, filled with an apparent clarity, Elric stepped, side by side with Oone, through the shimmering silver gateway into Imador, called mysteriously by dreamthieves the Land of New Ambition, and found himself at the top of an heroic flight of steps which curved downward towards a plain which stretched towards an horizon turned a pale, misty blue and which he could almost have mistaken for the sky. For a moment he thought that he and Oone were alone on that vast stairway and then he saw that it was crowded with people. Some were engaged in hectic conversation, some bartering, some embracing, while others were gathered around holy men, speech makers, priestesses, story-tellers, either listening avidly or arguing.

The steps down to the plain were alive with every manner of human intercourse. Elric saw snake-charmers, bear-baiters, jugglers and acrobats. They were dressed in costumes typical of the desert lands-enormous silk pantaloons of green, blue, gold, vermilion and amber-coats of brocade or velvet-turbans, burnouses and caps of the most intricate needlework-and burnished metal and silver, gold, precious jewels of every kind-animals, stalls, baskets overflowing with produce, with fabrics, with goods of leather and copper and brass.

"How handsome they are!" he remarked. It was true that though they were of all shapes and sizes the people had a beauty which was not easily defined. Their skins were all healthy, their eyes bright, their movements dignified and easy. They bore themselves with confidence and good humour and while it was clear they noticed Oone and Elric walking down the steps, they acknowledged them without making any great effort to greet them or ask them their business. Dogs, cats and monkeys ran about in the crowd and children played the cryptic games all children play. The air was warm and balmy and full of scents of fruit, flowers and the other goods being sold. "Would that all worlds were like this," Elric added, smiling at a young woman who offered him embroidered cloth.

Oone bought oranges from a boy who ran up to her. She handed one to Elric. "This is a sweet realm indeed. I had not expected it to be so pleasant." But when she bit into the fruit she spat it into her hand. "It has no taste!"

Elric tried his own orange and he, too, found it a dry, flavourless thing.

The disappointment he felt at this was out of all proportion to the occurrence. He threw the orange from him. It struck a step below and bounced until it was out of sight.

The grey-green plain appeared unpopulated. There was a road sweeping across it, wide and well-paved, but there was not a single traveler visible, in spite of the great crowd. "I wonder why the road is empty," he said to Oone. "Do all these people sleep at nights on these steps? Or do they disappear into another realm when their business here is done?"

"Doubtless that question will be answered for us soon enough, my lord."

She linked her arm in his own. Since their love-making in the wood a sense of considerable comradeship and mutual liking had grown up between them. He knew no guilt; he knew in his heart that he had betrayed no-one and it was clear she was equally untroubled. In some strange way they had restored each other, making their combined energy something more than its sum. This was the kind of friendship he had never really known before and he was grateful for it. He believed that he had learned much from Oone and that the dreamthieves would teach him more that would be valuable to him when he returned to Melnibone to claim his throne back from Yyrkoon.

As they descended the steps it seemed to Elric that the costumes became more and more elaborate, the jewels and headdresses and weapons richer and more exotic, while the stature of the people increased and they grew still more handsome.

From curiosity he stopped to listen to a story-teller who held a crowd entranced, but the man spoke in an unfamiliar language-high and flat-which meant nothing to him. He and Oone paused again, beside a bead-seller, and he asked her politely if those gathered on the steps were all of the same nation.

The woman frowned at him and shook her head, replying in still another language. There seemed few words in it. She repeated much. Only when they were stopped by a sherbet-seller, a young boy, could they ask their question and be understood.

The lad frowned, as if translating their words in his head. "Aye, we are the people of the steps. Each of us has a place here, one below the other."

"You grow richer and more important as you descend, eh?" asked Oone.

He was puzzled by this. "Each of us has a place here," he said again and, as if alarmed by their questions, he ran off up into the dense crowd above. Here, too, there were fewer people and Elric could see that their numbers thinned increasingly as the steps neared the plain. "Is this an illusion?" he murmured at Oone. "It has the air of a dream."

"It is our sense of what should be that intrudes here," she said, "and it colours our perception of the place, I think."

"It is not an illusion?"

"It is not what you would call an illusion." She made an effort to find words but eventually shook her head. "The more it seems an illusion to us, the more it becomes one. Does that make sense?"

"I think so."

At last they were nearing the bottom of the stairway. They were on the last few steps when they looked up to see a horseman riding towards them across the plain, creating a huge pillar of dust as he came.

There was a cry from the people behind them. Elric looked back and saw them all rushing rapidly up the stairs and his impulse was to join them, but Oone stayed him. "Remember we cannot go back," she said. "We must meet this danger as best we can."

Gradually the figure on the horse became distinguishable. It was either the same warrior in the armour of mother-of-pearl, ivory and tortoiseshell, or one who was identical. He bore a white lance tipped with a point of sharpened bone and the thing was aimed directly at Elric's heart.

The albino jumped forward in a manoeuvre designed to confuse his attacker. He was almost under the horse's hoofs when he struck upwards with his swiftly drawn sword and cut at the lance. The force of the blow sent him reeling to one side while Oone, reacting with almost telepathic co-ordination, almost as if they were controlled by a single brain, leapt and thrust beneath the raised left arm, seeking their assailant's heart.

Her thrust was parried by a sudden movement of the rider's gauntleted right hand and he kicked out at her. Now, for the first time, Elric saw his face clearly. It was thin, bloodless, with eyes like the flesh of long-dead fish and a sneering gash of a mouth, opening now in a grimace of contempt. Yet with a shock he saw, too, something of Alnac Kreb! The lance swung to strike Oone's shoulder and send her to the ground.

Elric was up again before the lance could return, his sword slashing at the horse's girth-strap in an old trick learned from the Vilmirian bandits, but he was blocked by an armoured leg and the lance returned to thrust at him while he darted clear, giving Oone her opportunity.

Though Elric and Oone fought as a single entity, their attacker was almost prescient, seeming to guess their every move.

Elric began to believe the rider to be wholly supernatural in origin and even as he feinted again he sent his mind out into the realms of the elementals, seeking any aid which might possibly be available to him. But there was none. It was if every realm were deserted, as if, overnight, the entire world of elementals, demons and spirits had been banished to limbo. Arioch would not aid him. His sorcery was completely useless here.

Oone cried out sharply and Elric saw that she had been flung back against the lowest step. She tried to climb to her feet but something was paralyzed. She could hardly move her limbs.

Again the pale rider chuckled and began to advance for the kill.

Elric roared out his old battle-shout and raced towards their opponent, trying to distract him. The albino was horrified at the possibility of harm coming to the woman for whom he felt both profound love and comradeship and he was willing to die to save her.

"Arioch! Arioch! Blood and souls!"

But he had no runesword to aid him there. Nothing save his own wits and skills.

"Alnac Kreb. Is this what remains of you?"

The rider turned, almost impatiently, and flung the lance at the running man. His answer.

Elric had not anticipated this. He tried to throw his body aside but the haft of the lance struck his shoulder and he fell heavily into the dust, losing his grip on the unfamiliar sabre. He began to scrabble towards it even as he saw the rider draw his own long blade and continue towards the helpless Oone. He raised himself to one knee and threw his poignard with desperate accuracy. The blade went true, between the plates of the rider's back armour, and the lifted sword fell suddenly.

Elric reached his sabre, got to his feet and saw to his horror that the rider was rearing over Oone, the sword again raised, ignoring the wound in his shoulder.

"Alnac?"

Again Elric tried to appeal to whatever part of Alnac Kreb was there, but this time he was completely ignored. That same hideous, inhuman chuckling filled the air; the horse snorted, its hoofs pawing at the woman as she struggled on the step.

Scarcely aware of his own movement, Elric reached the rider and leapt forward, dragging at his back, trying to haul him from the horse. The rider growled and managed to turn. His whistling sword was parried by Elric's and the albino had unseated him. Together the pair fell to the sand, a few inches from where Oone lay. Elric's sword-hand was crushed under his attacker's armoured back, but he managed to tug the poignard free with his left hand and would have struck at those hideous dead eyes had not the man's fingers closed on his wrist.

"You'll kill me before you harm her!" Elric's normally melodic voice was a snarl of hatred. But the warrior merely laughed again, the ghost of Alnac fading from his eyes.

They fought thus for several moments, neither gaining any true advantage. Elric could hear his own breathing, the grunting of the armoured man, the whinnying of the horse and Oone's gasp as she tried to get to her feet.

"Pearl Warrior!"

It was another voice. Not Oone's, but a woman's; and it carried considerable authority.

"Pearl Warrior! You must do no further violence to these travelers!"

The warrior grunted but ignored the woman. His teeth snapped at Elric's throat. He tried to turn the poignard towards the albino's heart. There were drops of foaming saliva on his lips now-beads of white rimming his mouth.

"Pearl Warrior!"

Suddenly the warrior began to speak, whispering to Elric as if to a fellow conspirator. "Don't listen to her. I can aid thee. Why do you not come with us and learn to explore the Great Steppe, where all the hunting is rich? And there are melons, tasting like the most delicate cherries. I can give thee such wonderful clothing. Do not listen. Do not listen. Yes I am Alnac, thy friend. Yes!"

Elric was repelled by the insane babble, more than he had been by the creature's horrible appearance and his violence.

"Think of all the power there is. They fear thee. They fear me. Elric. I know thee. Let us not be rivals. Together we can succeed. I am not free, but thou couldst journey for us both. I am not free, but thou wouldst never bear responsibilities. I am not free, but, Elric, I have many slaves at my disposal. They are thine. I offer thee new wealth and new philosophies, new ways of fulfilling every desire. I fear thee and thou fearest me. So we will bind us together, one to the other. It is the only tie that ever means anything. They dream of thee, all of them. Even I, who do not dream. Thou art the only enemy ..."

"Pearl Warrior!"

With a rattle of bone and ivory, of tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl, the leprous-skinned warrior disentangled himself from Elric. "Together we can defeat her," he mumbled urgently. "There would be no force to resist us. I will give thee my ferocity!"

Nauseated by all this, Elric climbed slowly to his feet, turning to stare in the same direction as Oone, who now sat on the step, nursing limbs to which life seemed to be restored.

A woman, taller either than Elric or Oone, stood there. She was veiled and hooded. Her eyes moved steadily from them to the one she called Pearl Warrior and then she raised the great staff she held in her right hand and struck at the ground with it.

"Pearl Warrior! You must obey me!"

The Pearl Warrior was furious. "I do not wish this!" he snarled and, clattering, brushed at his breastplate. "You anger me, Lady Sough."

"These are my charges and under my protection. Go, Pearl Warrior. Kill elsewhere. Kill the true enemies of the Pearl."

"I do not want you to order me!" He was surly, sulking like a child. "All are enemies of the Pearl. You, too, Lady Sough."

"You are a silly creature! Begone!" And she lifted the staff to point beyond the stairway, where hazy rock could be seen, rising up for ever.

He said again, warningly, "You make me angry, Lady Sough. I am the Pearl Warrior. I have the strength from the Fortress." He turned to Elric as if to a comrade. "Ally yourself with me and we'll kill her now. Then we shall rule-thou in thy freedom, me in my slavery. All of this and many other realms beside, unknown to dreamthieves. Safety is there for ever. Be mine. We shall be married. Yes, yes, yes ..."

Elric shuddered and turned his back on the Pearl Warrior. He went to help Oone to her feet.

Oone was able to move all her limbs but she was still dazed. She looked back at the steps which disappeared above them. Not a single one of the people who had occupied that vast staircase was visible.

Troubled, Elric glanced at the newcomer. Her robes were of different shades of blue, with silver threads running through them, hemmed with gold and dark green. She carried herself with extraordinary grace and dignity and stared back at Oone and Elric with an air of amusement. Meanwhile the Pearl Warrior climbed to his feet and stood defiantly to one side, alternately glaring at Lady Sough and offering Elric a hideous conspiratorial smile.

"Where are all the folk of the steps gone?" Elric asked her.

"They have merely returned to their home, my lord," said Lady Sough. Her voice, when she addressed him, was warm and full, yet retained all the authority with which she had ordered the Pearl Warrior to stop his attack. "I am Lady Sough and I bid you welcome to this land."

"We are grateful for your intervention, my lady." Oone spoke for the first time, though with a degree of suspicion. "Are you the ruler here?"

"I am merely a guide and a navigator."

"That mad thing there accepts your command." Oone rose, rubbing at her arms and legs, glaring at the Pearl Warrior who sneered, becoming shifty as Lady Sough gave him her attention.

"He is incomplete." Lady Sough was dismissive. "He guards the Pearl. But he has such an insubstantial intelligence, he cannot understand the nature of his task, nor who is friend or who foe. He can make only the most limited choices, poor corrupt thing. The ones who put him to this work had, themselves, only the faintest understanding of what was required in such a warrior."

"Bad! I will not!" The Pearl Warrior began to utter his chuckle again. "Never! It is why! It is why!" It is why!"

"Go!" cried Lady Sough, gesturing once more with her staff, her eyes glaring above her veil. "You have no business with these."